Shuhei Yoshida on the PS Vita’s Flop: Sony’s former head of PlayStation, Shuhei Yoshida, has offered insights into why the PS Vita did not succeed as well as its predecessor.
Main Reasons for Failure
According to Yoshida, a key factor was the split development resources. Development teams were allocated between the PS4 and Vita, leading Sony to prioritize the more popular home console system:
Development resources were split and they didn’t have enough studios to make games for 2 platforms, so they had to prioritize PS4 development.
Other Contributing Issues
Proprietary Memory Cards
Propriety memory cards were a significant downfall, as consumers had to spend more money for additional storage. Yoshida acknowledges this was a mistake:
That was a mistake. People have to spend more money to get the memory card.
Design Choices
The rear touch panel and OLED display, which seemed promising during prototypes, were ultimately deemed unnecessary or too costly. Removing TV-out functionality from the final consumer model also contributed to poor sales.
In the development hardware for Vita, it had a video out so a developer can connect to screen and develop games on and somehow, the team decided to take that feature out from the consumer unit to save a few cents.
Have you owned a Vita? Do you think the platform was worthy of greater resource allocation from Sony?
The Vita was great, but I didn’t really get into more than a handful of games until SD2VITA became available. (The adaptor allowing the use of an SD card through the game slot).
Sure, then you can’t use game cards, but who needs those now that you dump games and keep your entire library on that one SD card, ready to go anytime, for pennies?
If that had been how it worked from the start, I would have bought so many more games. The library started off decent, and aventually got really damn good.
But a lot was digital only, especially the indie stuff, so at the time, getting new games was like pulling teeth.
I only got it to play WipEout 2048, but Gravity Rush turned out to be one of my all time favorite games, and Killzone Mercenaries showed me the genius of gyro aim before anyone else had even heard of it.